The Maori War (1920)

[Valles]

His name was Rangi Nome, and, like half the men in his hoe, he was not Maori, but Mayan. His line and the line of his mothers had come to the land of the same name with Hoka Nome and his eight canoes, and remained there for a thousand years. He could sing the chant of every generation from that name to his own, and he knew their deeds, just as his cousins did, and the Tattooed Ones knew those of their ancestors.

None of those ancestors had seen a sight such as this.

The city of Whanganui sprawled around, and towered over, what was, today, the busiest harbor in the world. Its bay was crammed full of more than two hundred merchant ships, brought home to be safe from the wars spilling into the world's seas, that lay at anchor under the same black-red-and-white flag and were now joined by ten great battleships and nearly forty lesser warships... and by the one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers of the First Army, himself among them.

Rangi - it was a common name, even moreso than 'John' would have been in another country - was the ninth man of the hoe, carrying another weapon than the battle rifle issued to the others. In his case, one of only one hundred and sixty puiarepo issued to the invading forces. Most of the men with his job had to make do with a submachine gun or, if they were lucky, one of the light machine guns that had been designed by beefing up the battle rifle's frame and action and adding a bipod, but the puiarepo were only starting to enter production.

Leaning against his leg and seat as he and his buddies enjoyed lunch at one of Whanganui's jam-packed cafes, the weapon looked essentially like a pipe model of a gun, connected to a large canvas backpack by a short length of hose. Within the canvas, though, were two pressurized tanks, one, the upper and larger, flat and boxlike and filled with sticky, flammable oil, while the other, cylindrical and at the small of the back, was full of compressed air. A revolving cylinder built into the 'gun' held cartridges like shotgun shells, that would fire and fill its barrel with white-hot sparks when he pulled the first trigger. The second trigger opened the valve that kept the air tank from spraying the fuel tank's contents across everything within fifty feet of the muzzle.

It would be an ugly, ugly way to die. Rangi thought that perhaps the thing was a kadun, a malicious spirit, one of the lesser ones that could be bargained with, but if it kept it from being his own buddies that died, he'd pay the thing's price and gladly.